, follows them up, and
completes the work.

There is also such a thing as inventions being born before their
time--the advanced mind of one generation projecting that which cannot
be executed for want of the requisite means; but in due process of
time, when mechanism has got abreast of the original idea, it is at
length carried out; and thus it is that modern inventors are enabled to
effect many objects which their predecessors had tried in vain to
accomplish. As Louis Napoleon has said, "Inventions born before their
time must remain useless until the level of common intellects rises to
comprehend them." For this reason, misfortune is often the lot of the
inventor before his time, though glory and profit may belong to his
successors. Hence the gift of inventing not unfrequently involves a
yoke of sorrow. Many of the greatest inventors have lived neglected
and died unrequited, before their merits could be recognised and
estimated. Even if they succeed, they often raise up hosts of enemies
in the persons whose methods they propose to supersede. Envy, malice,
and detraction meet them in all their forms; they are assailed by
combinations of rich and unscrupulous persons to wrest from them the
profits of their ingenuity; and last and worst of all, the successful
inventor often finds his claims to originality decried, and himself
branded as a copyist and a pirate.

Among the inventions born out of time, and before the world could make
adequate use of them, we can only find space to allude to a few, though
they are so many that one is almost disposed to accept the words of
Chaucer as true, that "There is nothing new but what has once been
old;" or, as another writer puts it, "There is nothing new but what has
before been known and forgotten;" or, in the words of Solomon, "The
thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there is no new thing
under the sun." One of the most important of these is the use of
Steam, which was well known to the ancients; but though it was used to
grind drugs, to turn a spit, and to excite the wonder and fear of the
credulous, a long time elapsed before it became employed as a useful
motive-power. The inquiries and experiments on the subject extended
through many ages. Friar Bacon, who flourished in the thirteenth
century, seems fully to have anticipated, in the following remarkable
passage, nearly all that steam could accomplish, as well as the
hydraulic engine and the diving-bell, t